2011 newsmaker: Emma Stone

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SAN DIEGO - It's always tough being the other woman, and no one knows that better than Emma Stone.

In the upcoming 2012 franchise reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, the 23-year-old actress will play Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's first comic-book love. It's her job to make fans forget Spidey's famous red-haired love, Mary Jane Watson, and Kirsten Dunst, the actress who portrayed her in the first three Spider-Man films.

"I was so, so excited to learn about Gwen, because (I) hadn't read the comic book growing up, and my experience was with the Sam Raimi movies. . . . I always assumed that Mary Jane was his first love," Stone said in an exclusive interview with Postmedia News at Comic-Con, the pop-culture convention in San Diego in July. "Now I've become so hyper-protective of Gwen, the way she affected Peter and what happened with him and Mary Jane later on. . . . His reaction to Mary Jane is different because of Gwen."

The past year has been good to Stone, with key parts in two acclaimed, successful films - The Help and Crazy, Stupid, Love - as well as a supporting role in the rom-com Friends with Benefits. But if 2011 was Stone's breakout year, her appearance in Spider-Man, set to open July 3, 2012, could take her to the next level of superstardom.

During a summer news conference on at Comic-Con, Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad called Peter Parker's romance with Gwen Stacy "probably the greatest love story in Marvel (Comics history)."

"I just thought her story was epic," Stone said. "When you hear the story of Gwen Stacy for the first time, I'm sure, at any age, it floors you."

While plot details of the Spider-Man film are being kept largely under wraps, Gwen Stacy's story in the comic books is littered with drama and tragedy. Her police-chief father dies at the hands of falling debris during one of Spider-Man's battles, something she blames the hero for. Stacy herself dies later at the hands of the Green Goblin; the incident shocked the comic-book world in 1973, because a superhero's failure had never had such dire consequences before.

Stone also says her character "couldn't be any more different than Mary Jane," who, in the films, was a struggling, poor actress with a verbally abusive father.

"(Gwen) grew up on the Upper East Side (of New York), had a very stable family - a daddy's girl," she said. "Her father was the police chief. . . . She's the oldest in her family (and) she has younger brothers. She is very responsible and very protective of her family and she loves science; she is a valedictorian. She has her whole life planned out for her and then she gets to know Peter. . . . They teach each other so much, because they're from two so totally different backgrounds and experiences. . . . He's never really known sit-down family dinners with siblings and parents, and what it's like to grow up in one house your whole life, and be under the thumb of your father."

Stone said Gwen offers Parker a world of stability, of a family unit not marred with parental loss and, beyond physical allure, the two also forge an intellectual connection over their shared love of science.

"And they're first loves," she added. "So that alone will give you so much as a person."

As for the new man behind the mask, Stone said Andrew Garfield, a lifelong fan of the comic, was practically born to play the role.

"The most important thing in anyone who is going to play Peter Parker . . . is that (he) truly loves Spider-Man and Peter Parker, and wants to protect them and do them proud," she said. "And Andrew truly loves Spider-Man and truly loves Peter Parker, and seems to really understand his flesh and blood. Peter is in his bones. . . . At the camera test, we'd be talking in-between (takes) while they were setting up, and the camera would turn on and his body would change and his face would change. . . . Truly, I feel like this is a crazy thing to say, but it's not. He became Peter before all of our eyes. He goes from 27 to 17 in a span of seconds. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, it's fantastic."

Stone said the film makes a conscious choice to be more gritty, dark and grounded in our everyday reality.

"One of the major reasons they wanted to tell this version of the story (is) to kind of get up close and personal with Peter and into the really intimate details of how he grew, not just into becoming Spider-Man, but how he grew to become the Peter Parker we see today -what his experience was as a child and what his relationship was with his father . . . and the story of Gwen Stacy, which we've never seen before cinematically.

"There are just a lot of elements that are really grounded and earthbound, " she said. "They just happen to take place in this world where an ordinary boy becomes super-human. . . . That was definitely the draw for me wanting to be part of it. It felt like us sitting here talking, and you forget, in a minute, (he's) going to swing away. He just happens to be Spider-Man and things proceed from there that are extraordinary, but his actual outlook, his reasoning, his relationships, are right here on Earth with us."

The film's director, Marc Webb, who spun a magical onscreen romance in 500 Days of Summer, said to "expect great things" from Stone and Garfield's performance on screen together

"That's one of the things that has made Spider-Man very unique in . . . the comics - there is a really tender, romantic quality to it," he said at Comic-Con. "And that's something that has always fascinated me about cinema, is good romance, and that was something really fun to explore with Andrew and Emma, who did such great work on screen. I (had) so much fun putting together the scenes with Andrew and Emma. There is such tenderness and honesty in that. One of the reasons I wanted to make the film is to explore that very important part of the Spider-Man mythology."

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